With:
Ulises A. Mejias, Professor of Communication Studies, SUNY Oswego
Nick Couldry, Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics
February 25, 12-1:30 p.m.
Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley
In their new book, “Data Grab,” Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry argue that the role of data in society must be understood as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new form of “data colonialism” gives shape to a social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but rather on the appropriation of human life through data. Resisting it will require strategies that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for decades.
Join Mejias and Couldry at 12 p.m. on February 25 at BESI for a talk on their new book and its provocative thesis. An open Q&A with the speakers will follow.
About the Speakers
Ulises A. Mejias is a professor of communication studies at SUNY Oswego. He is the recipient of the 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and a 2021-2025 Fulbright Specialist. He is the author of “Off the Network” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) as well as multiple articles. He serves on the boards of Humanities New York, a National Endowment for the Humanities affiliate, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is a professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and, since 2017, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of 17 books, including “The Mediated Construction of Reality” (Polity, 2016), which he co-authored Andreas Hepp, “Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice” (Polity, 2012), “Why Voice Matters” (Sage, 2010), “Media: Why It Matters” (Polity, 2019), and “Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction” (Routledge, 2021). His latest book, “The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t?” was published by Polity in 2024.
Together, Couldry and Mejias have authored “The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism” (Stanford University Press, 2019) and “Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back” (Chicago University Press, 2024). They are also co-founders, with Paola Ricaurte, of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists.